Saturday, 26 April 2014

Celibacy Pt 2 - An Outdated and Failed Experiment

Easily the most read post on the BGBC Blog has been that
which I published on 12 March 2012: Celibacy For Gays – A Deconstruction. It
has had, on average, sixty views every month since its publication just over
two years ago. It has been read on every continent in the world and in so many
different countries that it has surprised even me by the interest it has
generated.

In that post, I attempted to spell out the catastrophic
consequences of:

1.Telling a person that despite being gay, they
must never ever act on their sexuality or express it;

2.Mandating such a rule from authoritative people
like clergy and church leadership;

3.Declaring that such a rule is what God wants;

4.Policing that rule with church sanctions;

5.Declaring that a person who breaks that rule is
sinning and rebelling against God;

6.Declaring that a person who breaks that rule is
contravening nature;

7.Insisting that such a person repent and return
to mandated lifelong commitment to celibacy no matter the personal cost.

I attempted to spell out that cost, especially to a young
gay person; to show what it actually means in the lived experience when a
church leader tells a young person they must commit the rest of their lives to
sensual and sexual isolation, not because they want to, but because they are
told to.

So why the interest in of all things – celibacy? Why after
fighting for so many years to declare that being gay is okay and being gay does
not exclude a person from being Christian is the traditional church now so
powerfully interested in the notion of ensuring that gay people not express
their sexuality?

A New Fight

There is a good reason. It would appear to all intents and
purposes that the war on gays is over; at least relatively speaking. There are
still skirmishes here and there but the shift towards positive attitudes to gay
people is unmistakable and unstoppable. It has been so significant and so rapid
that it has left many stunned and shocked. There is now widespread acceptance
that gay people have always been around, that we are around today and not
ashamed anymore and so are out and very public. Gays are now part of the
furniture in the developed world and are gradually becoming relatively unremarkable.
When a well-known figure or celebrity comes out these days, it’s not such a big deal anymore. “Oh yeah, I
always wondered” or “good for him” “good for her” are common responses
nowadays. In fact, it goes even further than this. Gay people are now so out
and public that we are now active in ensuring that our rights are not trampled
upon by traditional bigotries. We have been and continue to be strong and
voluble advocates for gay rights and the removal of discriminations. We even
want our relationships recognised by our respective societies in the push for the
acceptance of marriage for our community.

And as this monumental social change has taken place and
taken root, the traditional evangelical church’s view on gay people, which has
been the loudest and most strident, has lost purchase with general Western
society. People in developed countries are well educated and know at least
basically how this whole gay thing works. They know that people don’t just wake
up one day and decide to be gay. They know that the gay youth suicide rate is way
too high and is a powerfully distressing phenomenon for local communities and
nations.

Some statistics from the United States:

·Lesbians are two times more likely to
attempt suicide than straight women;

·Gay men are six times more likely to
attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers;

·Attempts by gay and lesbian youth
account for up to 30% of all completed suicides;

·Gay teens are 3 times more likely to
attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers.

People know that these numbers are caused by rejection and
self-disgust, the perception in young gay people that they are sick or sinful
or unacceptable or filthy because they have been told explicitly by church or
family that this is so and that they lack the emotional maturity to be able to handle such
devastating declarations about their life. People have gotten the message that
it has been society and church that has been sick, not the young gay person.
The world is waking up to the reality of the harm of such prejudice. Society
has heard the stories about people like Matthew Shepherd and Tyler Clementi
losing their lives due to the tumultuous issues around gay sexuality for young
people and when there is a real face with a real name on the news, there is
empathy and attitudinal shift occurs.

They have either read or heard at least a modicum of science
that a gay sexuality is significantly determined by genetic and biologic
factors. They know gay people personally. They work with them. Gay people are
part of their schools, universities, hospitals, retail centres, their families.
Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends. Society has moved on.

Yes, there are and always will be pockets of homophobia;
always due to fear and ignorance. But on the whole, the churches know that they
have lost this war. No longer can they get away telling the world that being gay
is a sin, a punishment from God, a rejection of God, a deal-breaker with God, a
ticket to burn in hell for eternity. No-body is buying it anymore. Not because
society has become godless and profane but because those traditionally taught
notions are nonsensical and juvenile and harmful and are seen to be in the
public discourse. There is more education out there now. Those attitudes simply
do not make sense in a twenty first century world.

So what is the response of the traditional churches?

“Let’s go to Plan B. Okay,” they say, “you can be gay. We
can’t change you and we’ve learned that the hard way. We know that most people
accept you as you are and we know how bad it makes us look that they do and we
don’t. We know how bad it makes us look when they offer love and acceptance and
we don’t. So, you can be gay. There’s probably nothing we can do to change that
anyway. But while you can call yourselves gay and while you can think of
yourselves as gay, we demand, because we speak for God and we know that we are
about to command is exactly and precisely what God wants, that you NEVER EVER
EVER enact any sexual behaviour with someone of your own gender, that you NEVER
EVER EVER fall in love with someone of your own gender, that you NEVER EVER
EVER touch anyone or be touched by anyone in a sensual and loving way with your
own gender and that you obey our command for the REST OF YOUR LIFE. If you
disagree and disobey with what we demand as being the judges of you being
acceptable or not to God and his church (that’s us), you will be in sin and you
will be rejecting God and you will wear in your self the punishment and pain of
rejecting God. This is a deal-breaker between you and God and for those of us
who are obsessed with this kind of thing, we do not hesitate to tell you that
you will burn in hell for eternity for expressing your gay sexuality because
that’s what we believe is in store for all unrepentant sinners”.

In other words, NOTHING has changed. All that has happened
is that the focus has been shifted from the ontology of being a gay person to the expression of that ontology by living out
authentically your true and natural self. The same fundamentalist forces that
would have had you rejecting your natural gay self and returning to the closet
and possible marrying an opposite sex partner are now clamouring to stop you
from being a whole gay person by
refusing you the ability to express your sexuality. “You can be gay, but don’t
you dare do anything about it. You can be gay, but don’t have sex, don’t fall
in love, don’t touch anyone. Just shut up and be gay quietly and some of us might let you stay”. Thus, the call for
celibacy for gay people / gay Christians is a misplaced error of judgmental
reasoning. In the collective mind of homophobic fundamentalists, the exclusion
of sexual expression for gay people is the next best thing to the
non-acceptance of gay people. “Plan A didn’t quite work out the way we expected
so we will go to Plan B”.

Image via Shutterstock

While it may look like Plan B, when you analyse this
position, the belief that being gay
is wrong is still there. It is not really
an acceptance of our sexuality at all. It is a sleight of hand, a misdirection,
a religious illusion that would have young gay people, and older too, deny
their identity and once again go back into the religious closet and keep quiet
about sexuality once and for all. Why is sexual expression for gay people
wrong? Because being gay is wrong. Well, we’re here today to challenge that
notion.

This Blog Post

In this blog, I thought it might be time to put down some
thoughts why I oppose celibacy for gay Christians and offer the reader some
rationale for my position. This blog will perforce be more philosophical in its
nature than Part 1, but the interest is clearly there, so I feel the importance
of really spelling this out. To do this, the reader will need to understand from
where I am launching, both theologically and philosophically, otherwise this
whole discussion will not make sense or unnecessary arguments will be made that
can easily be clarified if you know how I think first. So to that brief
discussion, we go. To make things crystal clear, I have decided to enumerate my
position in point form. There is a basic logic and sequence to the points. I
will not discuss each point as to how I arrived at that conclusion for space
forbids and it is not important in this particular discussion. It is sufficient
to read the position statement below to gain an adequate understanding of what I
say about celibacy after it.

My Basic Position
(relevant to this issue)

God is love;

God is passionate about the earth and all of its
people;

It is possible (and wonderful), though not
essential, to make relationship with God conscious and intentional;

The first and greatest commandment, as focused
on by Jesus is, not to obey God, not to submit to God, not to fear God, not to
worship God, but to love God;

The second greatest commandment is to love our
fellow human beings (whether we like them or not);

The Christ came to show us that we are here to
become – to become fully human, to become fully self, to become the individual
we have the potential to be (he called it abundant living);

Part of the totality of human life is our sexual
identity (that we are sexual creatures and find certain stimuli erotic) and
within that identity we have a sexual orientation (the direction of ‘love
object’ (gender) to which we are attracted physically and emotionally;

Gay sexuality is a biopsychosocial orientation
that is highly biologically and genetically determined (as is heterosexuality);

It is neither wilfully chosen nor wilfully
changed;

It is not a sin, it is not a rejection of God;

It is not a sign of demonic oppression nor of
psychopathology;

Gay people have been around since the beginning
of recorded history and have been identified in every culture on earth;

If God is spoken of as the creator of human life
then gay people are as much an outpouring of God’s creative act as are straight
people;

God’s work of creation continues today and we
are invited, gay and straight, to share in that creative act by bringing peace
and justice to the world by compassion and care for our neighbour. As the
saying goes, his hands are my hands (Jesus called this the Kingdom of God);

The Bible is not the inerrant word of God but
the outcome of the endeavours of tribal people in the ancient world who had
very specific and clear agendas in what they wrote. It is more properly thought
of as a compilation or library of texts and while it does possess some internal
consistency, the texts have been edited out of their original forms literally
countless times and must be read with an acknowledgment that there is more than
one voice. The books that make up the compilation were decided by a series of
church councils of men only and concluded at the Council of Trent in the mid
1500s. To this day, Catholic and non-Catholic wings of the church differ in
places as to what is canonical and what is not.

There is much that is inspirational in the texts
especially in regard to dealing with God and in dealing with or fellow human
beings. The long line of prophetic tradition, in which Jesus stands, ie.,
loving God and standing with the marginalised, is the closest thing we have to
the teachings of Jesus about the nature of God and our place as relational
creatures in the world. Thus for me now, the Bible should only be read with
this guiding exegetical principle of charity. Where an interpretation shows no
charity, it is to be discarded as unhelpful in today’s world;

I do not now regard the Bible as un unstintingly
reliable text in all matters and can no longer countenance a ‘face-value’
reading of its many and varied texts. It is not a guideline about race, gender,
ethnicity or sexuality. It is a historical fact that the Bible has been used to
visit violence and oppression on a number of populations of people causing
untold distress. While there is much good in its texts, most notably in the
accounts of the life, example, teachings and dealings of Jesus, this good must
be teased apart from the voices of oppression and tribalism, the voices of
domination and coercion, the voices of false piety and ostentatious religion,
the voices that lack charity to the human condition;

I see today that the Spirit also speaks to us in
the lived experience of human life, in the lives of others, through the
creation, through music, poetry, art and literature, through silence and
contemplation;

I am not evangelical. I am not Catholic. Today, I
class myself, as stated in the book, in the camp of Progressive Christianity;

I do not hold that believing certain tenets
makes anyone a Christian or follower of Jesus. This focus on belief is an
appeal to orthodoxy that I now reject. For me now, the Christian life is not
about a list of precepts that I have to believe in order to be deemed orthodox.
I do not demand anyone believe or think as I do.

It is apparent that Jesus’ greatest enemies were
‘from within,’ ie., the religious leaders of his faith. Though they talked the
language of spirituality, their words and deeds were often condemned by Jesus.
The same happens today with so many church leaders. St Paul himself says that
you can talk up your spiritual credentials all you like, and in a dazzling
display of rhetorical flourish ‘you can manifest the tongues of men and of
angels and even prophesy’, but if you are not loving, then you are nothing but
hot air – an abrasive noisy gong or clanging cymbal; worse than hot air. For me
now, I am quite cynical of religion and the mess we have made of the Jesus
story (the Gospel) in this world;

Part of the mess is the catastrophic teachings
in the early church and in declamatory style from the third century on, that
sex is evil, sinful, profane and ungodly, the opposite of spirituality; forever
denoted as being associated with sin. The church got hung up about sex and
remains hung up about sex;

I do not see the body, sex or desire as in
anyway degraded or dirty or filthy or sinful. This does not make sense in a
twenty-first century world where we have better understandings of human
sexuality, nor is it congruent with incarnational theology that would have us
see the God-man Jesus as truly and fully human with his own sexuality and life
of erotica (anything less does not make him human);

I do not hold to a model of sin as the breaking
of a rule which demands punishment by an authoritarian parent figure. I now
hold a model of sin, a word I am happy to dispense with (as it is less than
helpful in our telling of the Jesus message), as being an estrangement – from
ourselves, from each other and from God. This tripartite model of sin has at
its centre the concept of respect, or if you prefer more theological language,
charity or love. Respecting oneself, respecting others, respecting God keeps us
connected and estrangement disappears. This model is also more consistent with
how the science of psychology views the human being and which aspects are, to
use a psychological turn of phrase, adaptive and which are maladaptive. I do
not see God as a punishing angry parent let alone an easily irritated judge
figure and view that model as being juvenile and immature;

Though it can be many things, a sexual act is a
connective act first – a sharing between two consenting adults;

Sexual connection for people, when all cultural,
social and religious attributes are stripped away, is typically a reaching out
for love and connection; a fundamental need in the human psyche;

I do not believe that God wakes up every morning
and says, ‘now who is having sex who is not married? Let me at ‘em’!;

While harm can come to people via sexual means,
it is always in the context of the estrangement of disrespect (Point 24) and
should be avoided and shunned;

The focus on personal sexual morality by the
twentieth century church has been a misalignment of what is really important in
the Gospel – relationality;

This misalignment has become sadly part of the
Judaeo-Christian culture throughout the world so that even ‘secular’
institutions, eg., the media, are ashamed and embarrassed by human sexuality;

I believe now that we need to change. We need to
grow up. We need to have a more adult view of human sexuality and abandon
altogether the guilt, the shame and the negativity around human sex, its
expression, its depiction and the discourse through which we talk about it.

Fundamentalist
Reaction

So I will not be arguing my position here based solely on
scriptures or on church teaching or tradition. I will be arguing my position based
on an overarching understanding that God wants our good and that abundant
living is his desire for us. I will be arguing that denial of identity is not a
good thing and is in fact life-negating not life-affirming. I will also argue
my position based on the science of psychology in which I have some expertise.
And I will be arguing my position based on the truth of my own and others’
lived experience and how that plays out across the lifespan of a human being. I
am not interested in having scripture wars. I am not interested in
fundamentalists telling me that “the Bible says - - - - -.” I am not interested
in evaluating my life or my faith up against their criteria. I do not hold
their paradigms about life or about God, so there is little value in entering
that fray.

But fundamentalist Christians who read this need to know
that I listened to your view for almost all of my young adult life. I was a
Christian gay man in psychological turmoil because of the church’s teachings
about sexuality. I was also a celibate man due to traditional Christian
teachings about sexuality and maintained that state for the best part of twenty
two years. At the end of that time, I was a significantly diminished person and
felt I could no longer go on as things were. It is one thing for you to stand
on high and judge and proclaim God’s voice as if you speak for him. It is
another to navigate our real life in this world and do so with all the
messiness and suffering that is part of human life, whether of faith or no. So
do not come to me and tell me that gay Christians should be celibate without
trying it yourself. Try one year of enforced involuntary celibacy. Try two
years, or five years. How about ten years? Try twenty years of sensual and
sexual isolation when you yearn for love. When you’ve lived twenty years of
ecclesiastically enforced involuntary celibacy, then come and talk to me about your religious worldview about
sexual ethics for my life and gay people in general.

Celibacy

Celibacy is a pretty counter-intuitive and self-defeating
phenomenon if you really think about it. It is the willing denial and impedance
of what is probably the most powerful drive within the human being after
survival. The drive to be sexual becomes conscious in our early teens. Puberty
is a biologically driven milestone where we gain secondary sexual
characteristics, in essence, we become physical adults and can reproduce, and
where, psychologically, the erotic becomes the focus of much of our internal
life and the awareness of sexuality takes centre stage. That milestone, once
begun never really goes away in most human beings although it is tempered when
older with other matters from the adult world. At puberty we become conscious sexual
creatures and that sexual identity begins to assert itself powerfully. It is one
of the strongest and most well-understood psycho-biologic changes in the human
being.

Adolescence follows where we are in a transition
psychologically between childhood and adulthood. Adolescence, which lasts into
the early twenties, is typically a time where the erotic life is one of the
most salient features of our internal world, whether we are sexually active or
not. The age of first sexual activity does seem to have crept down over the
last thirty years so that it is not uncommon for teens to have had their first
sexual encounter; something I am not a great fan of when they are particularly
young. But older adolescents typically begin their life of sexual activity.
There are often quite a few partners over the course of a decade and more and more,
young people use sex as a means to friendship and intimacy. It is a powerful
drive within.

But then celibacy. The willing denial of that drive. For
some it is self-imposed. But even there, it is only to conform to a set of
usually religious principles that are held strongly by the individual. For
others, it is imposed from without; a Catholic religious order, an evangelical
edict that gay people are not ever to express their sexuality, a church that
frowns publicly on sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage, and even
sometimes in cultic situations where a guru imposes celibacy on cult members.
It is a frustration or impedance to what the body and mind are powerfully and
naturally inclining towards. The river is damned.

Now of course, when one does this, such action is not
without consequences. In thinking of the involuntary celibate as I am in this
post, there follows an experience of forever wanting but never having, a
yearning for touch but never experiencing, a powerful drive to sexual expression
but never permitted, a deep need to be loved by another human being but forever
unmet.

Make no mistake. There is a price to pay for celibacy no
matter that it is self-imposed or imposed by the necessity of conforming to an
external rule. Loneliness, isolation, despair. Depression, anxiety, obsession.
Instability, skewed relationships, eccentricity that excludes.

I can think of no more exquisite torture for a young person
in the glowing candescence of their sexual flourishing than to impose upon
them, against their will, against their desire, against every fibre of their being, a
life-long obligation to sexual and sensual isolation; in reality, an
involuntary, externally prescribed, mandated and enforced domination over their
lives of celibacy spoken over them with the voice of God by respected authority figures and the disobedience
over which bringing sin and rejection by the church.

Religious Origins

So why? Why do this to oneself? Why place one’s life into a
tumult willingly? First, most young people who do this do not understand what
they are getting themselves into when they make such a decision. They do not
understand the power of loneliness as it has not yet taken root at the depths
of their soul. They only need to hear the voices of some of our elderly who
talk about the depths of their loneliness to take another look at their
decision and maybe run in the opposite direction. Life is too short for celibacy
and the loneliness that it brings, the oldies will tell them unhesitatingly.

Sex and The Sacred

Secondly, there is a reason why young people would choose this.
They have been told that should they wish to serve God, they must remain
celibate until they marry on pain of sin. They are told that if they are gay,
they must NEVER EVER express their sexuality and deny it for the rest of their
lives on pain of sin. Young Catholic people who feel they have a vocation to
the priesthood or religious life must effectively renounce their sexuality and
all expression of it and become mandated ‘eunuchs’ for life if they want to
‘join up.’

My close friend who was a Franciscan monk, not yet taken
final vows, finally abandoned his ‘call’ due to the relentless and unflinching
set of desires within him to express himself sexually; in his case as a gay
man. Another friend, a former Jesuit novice, also abandoned his vocation to the
priesthood after the Jesuits told him that his burgeoning gay sexuality was
unacceptable. In the order in which I was involved in the 1970s, the
Redemptorists, many of the priests left the order in the late 70s and 80s either
to marry or go off and be gay. Their life of imposed celibacy and the attendant
psychological distress was no longer to be borne. Almost all of the Catholic
religious orders have experienced the same thing; members of the various
congregations abandoning their vows to go off and marry or be gay, leaving
behind an aging remnant who live in vast houses and who must wonder what on
earth has happened. Diocesan Catholic priests who live alone in their
presbyteries in the local parishes report that the loneliness of their life and
ministry can be utterly crippling and not a few of them end in skewed clandestine
relationships and depressed or leave altogether. In the developed world, most
young Catholics who would otherwise contemplate a life of ministry will not do
so due to the mandated vow of celibacy; hence the shortage of priests across
the Western world.

But of course, the celibate priesthood was not there in the
beginning. It was imposed by Rome in the twelfth century and has been a curse
ever since. While it is true that some men have been able to navigate its murky
waters, most male clergy have struggled endlessly with celibacy because of
natural and ineradicable human desire, the yearning for someone close or
special, skin hunger – the desire for human touch, and the power of libido, the
drive to be sexual. Women religious too have had their struggles and this is
now becoming more and more talked about. Today, there is a world-wide
conversation in the Catholic Church as to the possibilities of relaxing or abandoning
mandate celibacy.

Clerical Child Abuse

In the present day, the Catholic Church, like a few others,
is engulfed in a firestorm of its own making: the clerical sexual abuse of
children and the cover-up of that abuse by bishops and church leadership. No
continent or country has been exempted from this disaster. And it IS a disaster
of unprecedented proportions in so many ways. While there is widespread denial
from church authorities that celibacy has anything to do with it, I cannot
accept that conclusion.

Mandated involuntary celibacy, especially over the course of
an adult lifetime, has severe negative consequences as I outlined above. Some
of these can be a skewed sense of sexuality and substantially impaired
relational dynamics. Opportunistic abuse by men who are severely sexually wounded
or immature or dysfunctional has occurred probably more frequently than outright
diagnosable paedophilic abuse. I see this as being systemic and not just a few
bad apples in that the formation to the Catholic priesthood especially in years
gone by has seen immature pre-pubescent or pubescent youth plucked out of their
homes and lives and catapulted into the myopic life of the church and away from
normal growth, maturation and relational processes, starting in the seminary
and followed by enforced celibate life in ministry, being told what to do by
bishops or religious superiors; in many ways, a wholly de-sexualised and
de-individuated life. Saturated in the existence of the church from a tender
age, it is no wonder we have had generations of priests who were juvenile in
their approach to sexuality, the body and desire, frightened by it yet drawn
toward it, some of whom acted out their dysfunctionality on defenceless kids.

An indictment on the church, its protocols, its history and its recent
behaviour in its attempt to minimise its responsibility and its clear failure.
Celibacy, while not the sole cause of the clerical sexual abuse scandal, must
share some responsibility for causing the greatest and most damaging scandal to
hit the Christian church in the modern era: the repugnant sexual abuse by
trusted ‘men of God’ to little kids who are less powerful than they.

Church Attitudes to
the Body

But why has the church been such an advocate of a
de-sexualised clergy and an opponent of any sexual behaviour for anyone outside
of heterosexual marriage? I think there are three reasons:

History;

Control;

Fear.

History

From the earliest times, the Christian church has frowned on
the body and associated it with the sins of the flesh. It has taught and
reiterated that human sexuality as evoked through desire, arousal and touch is
to be manipulated or corralled into one and only one specific form:
heterosexual marriage. It has eschewed the body, it has denigrated sex as being
the opposite of the sacred, that it is earthy and dirty while God is heavenly
and transcendent and beatific. The contradistinction has been pounded into the
ears of believers for centuries. I took some time in Being Gay Being Christian to talk about two of the early church
saints, Augustine and Jerome, both of whom had gargantuan sexual hang-ups, but of
whom both had principle parts to play in shaping and guiding the early church
in its attitudes to sex and the body. Augustine negativised sex and the body and
women to almost incomprehensible lengths [Google some of his sayings], while
Jerome was so uncomfortable with sex, and probably his own gay sexuality, that he
couldn’t even countenance the apostles having sex with their own wives.

St Paul himself also seems to have had hang-ups if the
accounts are to be believed. He felt the body, specifically here the genitals,
were “unseemly” or “parts that are unpresentable” (1 Cor 12:
23), something we do not hold to
today. In my teaching at the University, I regularly teach 3rd year
medical students to avoid all such embarrassment and shame language whether
articulated or on facial expression or body language with their patients who
might have sexual issues. The last thing we want is to treat the body,
something that every human being possesses, with Pauline unseemlyness.

It seems that, if he could have his way, his basic position
was no sex at all, but that concessions would be allowed due to, what he calls,
sexual immorality, or what I might call, desire. “It is good for a man not to
have sexual relations with a woman” (1 Cor 7: 1). That’s his foundation
statement. It’s good for a guy not to have sex. That’s where he starts. In
verse 5, he sets sexual activity up against prayer; the old sex is earthy and a
bit nasty but prayer is transcendent and beautiful. “Do not deprive each other
except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote
yourselves to prayer.” It’s as if he feels we can’t have sex with our spouses
AND be prayerful. Finally in verse 7, Paul announces his greatest wish, a
return to his fundamental position in verse 1. “I wish that all of you were as
I am.” Paul really wanted them all to be celibate - like him. Given that he
more than likely expected Christ’s return within his own lifetime, he was
probably not too concerned by the notion of the human race dying out should
every adult become celibate.

When I read Paul in relation to the body, to sex, to
marriage, to desire, I always get the impression I am reading someone who is
immature and naïve, someone uncomfortable with sex, someone probably
uncomfortable with his own sexuality and body. He would rather people didn’t
marry but says that “it’s better to marry than burn with passion” (v9), whereas
in today’s world, we would be more comfortable with the idea of burning with
passion, with the notion of being horny or being aroused or really wanting to
have sex. For us, there is not the association with it of being a rejection of
God; a sin. Paul’s own neuroses about sex undoubtedly influenced the church
fathers and subsequent leaders as they fashioned the early church and that,
refined in the middle ages by celibate monk-scholars so that we have become the
beneficiaries of a skewed and harmful view of human sexuality that urgently
needs correction.

Control

When you control someone’s sexuality, in effect, you control
their life. When you have the power to say who can have sex with whom, what
kind of sex is acceptable, when it is acceptable to have sex, who can marry
whom, who can have children, who cannot, or whether using contraception is
acceptable, you are wielding immense social power. The Christian Church has
been able to associate all these factors with the notion of orthodox belief which
shamefully has had the otherworldly focus of who gets to go to heaven and who
doesn’t. Even worse, who has to go to the other place. Sex has been
historically conjoined with who is a good person, a Christian, and who is a bad
person, an unbeliever. Now that is power. They can control what people will be
permitted to do, on pain of losing their eternal salvation, by declaring the
tenets of the faith and the religious and even eternal sanctions against those
who disobey. This keeps people coming to church, giving the church their
loyalty, their time, their energy, their strength, their tithes and offerings
and keeping the whole show running.

Cyncial? You betcha. This control over the
human body has been wielded by good men and bad over the centuries over that
most basic of our needs: our need to sexually connect. We still see the
Catholic Church today forbidding the use of contraception and declaring the use
of it to be a sin. And of course, we have seen the hypocrites too. Think of
former televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker ostentatiously prancing
around a stage declaring what God wants for all of us, while surreptitiously both
were betraying their wives’ trust and having extra-marital sexual encounters
and affairs. Celibacy can control people. It is linked especially today to the
unmarried and to the whole gay population. It is still linked with spirituality
and is a controlling mechanism to get people to conform to a particular point
of view.

Fear

From what I have said of the church above and elsewhere, it
is apparent that the church has had a long entrenched history of the fear of
sex and the body and desire: erophobia. It has never been comfortable with sex.
It does not know how to deal with it. Celibate priests have often never really
been wholly trusted by sexually active men and seen to be somehow lesser or
inadequate or effeminate. Priests themselves have had a dreadful history up to
the mid twentieth century of talking about sex in such a derogatory and
denigrating way. Some of the ‘marriage counselling’ that celibate priests have
given out to sexually active married people would be laughable if it were not
so tragic. Historically, with an all-male celibate priesthood, there has been a
long mistrust and lack of comprehension of women and their sexuality. The
church has never understood women and still does not today. Misogyny has always
been a part of the Christian church. A gay man was always thought to be
effeminate and thus more womanly and to be repudiated. The fear and distrust of
the body and its church enforced association with sin has done a great
disservice to humanity in general; a position that sorely needs correction.

Celibacy and the Gay
Person

I take as my premise that the Bible does not speak about gay
sexuality as we know and understand it today. I have spelled this out in the
book and elsewhere on this blog and in interviews in no uncertain terms. The
Bible does talk about homogenital activity and does so in only a few places but
its various texts do not address the modern concept of sexual orientation. The
Bible has nothing to say about how I should live my gay life. It does have
plenty to say about how I should relate to God and how I should treat other
people, but it comes up short as guide book on how to live a healthy and
authentic gay life. Given that I now believe that our purpose in this life, at
least at one level, is to become, then I see that my becoming the best I can
be, the most I can be with my particular temperament, my particular
personality, my particular intelligence, my particular giftings and aptitudes,
my particular interests, is in a sense, my mission in life. It is to enter into
the ‘mostness’ of my own humanity. But as a Christian person, I also want to
assist the ‘realm of God’ as Jesus spoke of it, in spreading peace and justice
to my part of the world with especial care taken for the marginalised, for ‘the
least of these.’ Now part of my ‘becoming’ in my own humanity is my personal
journey in sexuality. It is not the same journey that straight people go
through; it is quite different.

On pages 68 and 69 of Being
Gay Being Christian, I discuss the formation of gay identity and use the
Cass model to discuss the various stages that most gay people typically
traverse more or less. This is a great example of becoming if ever there were
one. A vast change where I learn to accept myself, like myself, and begin to
slough off the shame of being gay personally and publicly. It is a process. My deepest
emotions are accessed over that time. I get in touch with the need to love and
be loved. I engage the need to touch and be touched. And of course this is in a
same gender context, the normalcy and goodness of fit in such experiences
expressing themselves strongly as I begin to feel at home. Enforced involuntary
celibacy, after such a journey to self, would be a massive insult to sexual
and emotional health; a boulder blocking the highway of a healthy sexual self.
We are left to wend our way through this for ourselves and within the confines
of our own consciences. Estrangement by disrespect, either to self, to another
or to God, is to be avoided.

A behaviour that on one side of a religious divide is
considered acceptable and healthy and on the other side of that divide is
considered sinful and rejecting of God obviously has a sense of neutrality about
it. It is obviously not the behaviour in and of itself that is the most
important thing here ethically. A little like eating meat if you were Catholic
pre-Vatican II (1960s). You could eat meat any day, but on Friday you were
expected not to eat meat. A religious meaning was imposed on it. Eating meat
itself was neutral. The religious imposition made it sinful on Fridays. Sex is
similar. It is an intimate act of connection. Without the religious imposition,
which is how most of society now views it, it can be an act of intimacy, exploration
or friendly connection. It is not viewed in terms of sin and rejection of God.
With the religious imposition, outside of heterosexual marriage it is a sin and
a rejection of God’s way. Same act. Different meanings. I would argue in
today’s world where churches just accept that there are few virgins walking down aisles and even fewer
virginal grooms waiting for them at the front of the church, that the rule or
the religious imposition should also not be the most important thing. Far more, it should be the
respect for the self within personal conscience. Denying the identity is not
respecting and looking after yourself. Acting like a eunuch when you are not
one is not respecting yourself. Torturing yourself is not respecting yourself. Loving someone is a precious gift. It is a
fundamental need to love and to be loved. Most human beings desire someone
special in their lives. We often try various relationships before we settle on
someone. Most people do, and many of them are Christians who go to church. During that time, we learn so much about ourselves, about the other
person, about how relationships do and don’t work. It is good material. It is
participating in the adult world.

Gay people need to be able to do this too like our straight
brothers and sisters already do. And we need to be able to do this in a way
that is healthy and respectful and that does not have Bible verse hand grenades
thrown at us from the sidelines as though any straight fundamentalist could
possibly understand our journey or where we are coming from. For most human
beings, perhaps a time of exploration in the early twenties, most human beings associate
sex with love. Loving relationships that are fulfilling and meet so many needs
are integral to the stability of a healthy adult life. It is frankly
nonsensical in today’s world to state that because I am gay AND happen to be a
follower of Jesus that I have to deny part of my identity for the rest of my
life; and to do so when I don’t actually believe God is demanding that of me at
all.

I am created a gay person. A healthy and respectful
expression of my sexuality is not only to be permitted but encouraged. No
analogy suffices but it’s like saying you can be a singer but you cannot sing.
Then in what way am I a singer? You can be a psychologist, but you can never
act as one. Then in what way am I a psychologist? You can be a dancer, but you
must never dance. Then in what way am I a dancer? How can I be something when I
cannot express its beingness? And please don’t come back at me and say, ‘you
can be a murderer, but you will never murder anyone again,’ or some such. That analogy falls down in that a murderer is obviously an ethically abhorrent
referent where as a gay sexuality like a straight sexuality or a singer,
psychologist or dancer are all ethically neutral referents.

I can only see involuntary enforced celibacy on gay
Christian people as being immoral and unjust. Such an enforcement or teaching
is harmful to people and loads the vulnerable with an unparalleled psychological
burden. It destines loving people to loneliness, sexual and sensual isolation and is
unnecessary when weighed up against competing notions of stable psychology, the
avoidance of psychopathology like depression, a fair go at achieving happiness
in life, the necessity of Biblical context, historical church erophobia,
the illogic of ontology not being able to express itself and the lack of
humanity and compassion inherent in imposed celibacy.

If you are gay or LGBT and a follower of Jesus, then you have
a right, some might even say a duty, to become, although the Spirit of God will never coerce, only ever invite. You have been created a gay
person and you have as much of the favour and love of God as any straight
person. You are meant to grow, to develop into the you you can be. Abundant
life, Jesus called it. Your faith does not exclude you from being gay nor does
it exclude you from expressing your sexuality, part of your identity. Your faith does not exclude you from loving. It doesn’t
make a lot of sense that God would create you as being a gay person and then
torture you by forbidding you to act on it. Unlike strict evangelicals, I hold
exactly the same view for straight people. Our human life is both wonderful and
challenging. As mammals, we are designed to be social animals. We are gregarious
to greater and lesser degrees. We need other human beings around us to function
well. Most of us need a special someone eventually to hold that place of greatest
intimacy and companionship. Gay people need that special someone too.

Celibacy is an outdated idea and a failed experiment
set up by ancient men who had very skewed ideas about human sexuality. It is
time we discarded it and stopped altogether associating sex, the body and
desire with sin and rejection of God. It is not. It is part of who we are. It
is part of what makes us human.

Don’t let yourself be coerced into committing
your life this way. I cannot for the life of me understand how such isolation and denial of identity would be
pleasing to a loving God, unless he's a sadist. And if you have already committed your life to
celibacy, I challenge you to re-think. Your life of sexual and sensual isolation
does not make you any more holy, any more acceptable to God, any more open to
God. Time for a re-think.

This is my position. I offer it not to tell you how to live,
what to do or what not to do, but for your consideration and prayerful
contemplation.